Up at 4:30, sun block and Vaseline on, some oatmeal and Pecan Pie in my belly and we're off for the Mexican border. 6am at the trail head and it's foggy, a border patrol officer has tailed us to make sure no one is jumping back in the car from over the border. He sits and watches us the whole time. We were hoping to touch that big fence but we'd have to climb a smaller barbed fence and didn't want to look like we were smuggling drugs... or guns... or people. We just wanted to look like hikers, because border patrol have guns and helicopters and stuff. Anyway, the trail angel left and we sort of hung around nervously for 10 minutes with Bow, realising we were now officially on the trail. And off we went.It got hot quick. Which makes me sweat. It didn't help that I kept thinking every bush held a rattlesnake, every rocky overhang hid a mountain lion, every hole held scorpions or tarantulas. And there were a lot of small suspicious looking holes in the trail, many with massive spider webs tunneling into them. But we mostly encountered ants and flies. Although just after a warning sign we came across our first rattlesnake! We didn't actually see it but boy could you hear it! I actually thought it was a burst water pipe at first! He was in some scrub to the right of the trail and started up just as Rebecca walked past, so me and Bow were now separated from Rebecca by a deadly creature, how dramatic! I admit I was quite nervous, but we skirted past on the upper side of the trail (not before Bow tried to get a closer look) and we were off again. Saw some Poison Oak, the day got even hotter too. Made it to Lake Morena (20mi/32km) at about 3:30pm, at which point it started raining. It didn't stop for two days.
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